“Third place,” a term coined by the writer Ray Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place, is a social setting where a person spends their time outside of home, work, and school. These spaces are casual in nature and used by community members to socialize. Historically, these range from parks and sports facilities to coffee shops and cafes. However, with online messaging taking over as the main source of social interaction for many, the amount of time spent in third places has decreased, especially amongst Gen Z.
For students at M-A, there seems to be no shortage of community spots to utilize. A quick eight-minute bike ride or 30-minute walk away from campus lies downtown Menlo Park, a bustling area with many restaurants and shops that students can enjoy. For students looking for a quiet place to read, downtown Menlo Park is also home to the Menlo Park Library, which boasts a Teen Zone where middle and high schoolers are encouraged to read, study, and relax.
Junior Amrith Venkatesh has been hanging out in downtown Menlo Park with his friends since middle school, and recalls getting ice cream with his group at Baskin-Robbins or snacks at Posh Bagel. “It’s a nice place where the community can gather together,” he said.
While for Venkatesh, attending third places requires spending money, he believes there should be more free spaces. “If you go to a store, they sometimes make you pay money to stay there,” Venkatesh said. “There should be an open place for people to hang out.”
Parks and outdoor recreational areas have consistently been some of the most popular free hangout spots. Near M-A, soccer pitches and concrete basketball courts are plentiful. However, some fields are losing their public availability, being only usable with a previous reservation.
Senior Cyrus Bitton often spends his free time playing soccer outdoors with his friends. Bitton wants fields to expand their open availability to the public. “Some of the fields you can’t even go to because you have to have reservations,” Bitton said. He believes that recreational sports are a great way to relieve stress. “People say that it takes up more of your time, but I think it actually helps manage your time as a de-stressor,” Bitton said. “It’s great that you can go to a place just with a ball and have fun with your friends.”
Some have expressed displeasure over the underutilization of public spaces, such as Economics teacher Jack Neumeier, who believes that these free spaces ought to be built and used more often, “I would say that Silicon Valley is the most disappointing metro in the world,” Neumeier said. “We should see beauty everywhere with the amount of money we have and yet it’s basically one big office park,” he added.
However, the internet has interrupted the movement to traditional third places, and has become a virtual third place itself, with an abundance of available chat rooms and video games. According to research from the Pew Research Center in 2010, 54% of all teens communicate daily through text messaging, while 33% of teenagers interact face-to-face daily and 30% communicate through phone calls.
With a shift towards text messages instead of calls and face-to-face interaction, teenagers are starting to trade in real human interaction for a more robotic and impersonal way of communication. “What worries me so much is people my age and younger can’t even talk to someone on the phone if they had to,” Neumeier said.
After running an experiment with students last year, giving them the option to earn a free pizza if they called Dominos rather than ordering from an app, Neumeier found the results to be very eye opening. “Half of my students said no, I’d rather just not be on the phone, I don’t want the free pizza,” Neumeier said.
However some, like senior Karina Gadre, believe that online features, like texting, have not fully hijacked third spaces for teenagers. “It’s not like a replacement, it doesn’t feel like a replacement,” Gadre said. “It feels better to hang out with people versus texting them,” she added.
For the most part, the internet seems to supplement third place interaction and is yet to replace real face-to-face connections completely. There’s always a tangible, physical place for someone to visit that piques their personal interests. For people who like board games, there are hobby shops galore for people to hang out and discuss gaming. For people who enjoy video games, there are arcades and cyber cafes where people can talk face-to-face and play the games they love. Many cities, like Menlo Park, host events for community members to enjoy and maybe find their own third place. However, the fates of these spaces depend on whether people actually decide to use them—even in the internet era.
